Spy vs. Spy, America vs. Israel

Daniel Pipes

By Daniel Pipes

Israelis spying on Americans is in the news again: leaders of the Jewish state just petitioned for Jonathan Pollard’s release and the Associated Press reported with alarm that U.S. national security officials at times consider Israel to be “a genuine counterintelligence threat.” Its tone of breathless outrage suggests: How dare they! Who do they think they are?

But spying on allies is the norm, and it’s a two-way street. Before getting too worked up, Americans should realize that Washington is no innocent. From Reagan to Obama, the U.S. government has sustained a massive spying effort against Israel. Examples:

Yosef Amit, a former major in Israeli military intelligence, spied for the CIA for several years, focusing on troop movements and policies toward Lebanon and the Palestinians, until his 1986 arrest.

Itamar Rabinovich, Israel’s ambassador to Washington in 1993-96, revealed that during his tenure, the U.S. government deciphered an Israeli code: “The Americans were certainly tapping the [embassy’s] regular phone lines” and even its secure line. As a result, he says, “Every ‘juicy’ telegram was in danger of being leaked. We sent very few of them. Sometimes I came to Israel to deliver reports orally.”

A mysterious submarine in Israeli territorial waters 11 miles from Haifa in November 2004, which fled upon discovery, turned out to be American, raising memories of the USS Liberty’s covert mission in June 1967.

Shamai Leibowitz

Yossi Melman, an Israeli journalist specializing in intelligence, found that U.S. military attachés in Tel Aviv gathered covert information; Israeli officials, he discloses, believe the U.S. intelligence services have been eavesdropping on conversations between key staff in Israel and at foreign missions. U.S. spying, he concludes, has exposed “Israel’s deepest policy secrets.”

An official history of Israel’s intelligence services published in 2008 found (as reported by Reuters) that U.S. spy agencies use the embassy in Tel Aviv to engage in electronic eavesdropping and train embassy staff for “methodical intelligence gathering.”

Barak Ben-Zur, a retired Shin Bet intelligence officer, wrote in that same volume that “The United States has been after Israel’s non-conventional capabilities and what goes on at the decision-making echelons.”

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